Introductory Applied Biostatistics [With CDROM]

Order was just what I expected and arrived very promptly. I would've had to pay over $100 dollars at the univeristy bookstore for this text, rather than the $33 price set by this seller.

This is the "required" textbook for my biostatistics course and after reading most of the chapters, I can see why. Being someone with a weak mathematical background, I find this book to be extremely clear and helpful, taking a step by step approach which is very easy to follow. All the examples are relevant to what is being explained, all the formulas are numbered so when they refer to them later in the text it's easy to find them, and at the end of each chapter is a table summarizing all the formulas and when to use them. As for the answers to the problems, there is a Students Solution Manual available, although I don't see the need for it because as it has been mentioned before, there are plenty of practice examples within the text, and I also have an instructor that can help me go through the problems if I don't understand, instead of simply giving me the answer.

Found the information to be well organized. Good examples of testing, clear statements of analysis process.

This is a great textbook for an introduction to biostatistics. My "required" textbook for my Introduction to Biostatistical Methods was way to technical for me to understand. I got this book to translate and really learn the basics (I have little mathmatics background). Its geared to those who may not have had any statistics backgrounds and easy to read.

In contrast to the first reviewer I loved this book! It should be pointed that I am reviewing this first official edition in hard cover with a CD-ROM while the first reviewer reviewed a preliminary edition in paperback with no CD and published in 2005 whereas this text has a 2006 copyright date. The authors are all statistics professors at Boston University with Ralph D'Agostino Sr. the most well-known. They have a great deal of experience as teachers researchers and consultants and it shows in the material and the clarity of presentation. Also to their credit, they provide numerous worked out examples in the text and plenty of exericises at the end of the chapters that can be given as homework problems. The other reviewer complained about not having any answers given in the back of the book. I question how valuable that would be. The in-text exercises and the clear exposition in the text , along with an instructor, should be enough for the students to gain enough confidence to try the homework problems with some confidence that they are doing them right! Also the instructor should have a solutions manual to work from or should put one together to go over the homework in class and/or in tutorial sections. Sometime students can waste a lot of time trying to force their solution to match the answer in the back of the book. What if there is a error or typo in the book's answer? I like the way the authors present the material and the fact that they illustrate the methodology with real examples and SAS software. Many of the analyses are done using the Framingham Heart Study data which is a well designed cohort study with thus far a long 50 year follow-up on the surviving original cohorts. We benefit from the authors' intimate knowledge of this data snd their ability to illustrate a variety of biostatistical methods using it. There is also an interesting follow-up study that was conducted with the offspring of the original Framington cohorts that is discussed in the book. The book starts with a motivating chapter. I did a similar thing in my introductory book for health science majors. Students in the health sciences are not very interested in math and may have a preconceived notion that statistics is boring mathematics and not relevant to their work. These ideas are very much off base and a good introductory chapter can dispell these notions. The next three chapters are standard to almost any first statistics course starting with ways to summarize data for description. This includes a section on statistical computing snd an introduction to the Framingham study and its data. Next an introductory chapter on probability is given that includes the basics and some important combinatorial ideas needed to understand the binomial distribution. Then the binomial and normal distributions are presented. This chapter and all subsequent chapters have a section on statistical computing using SAS. Appendix A provides the basic components of